He may be. The one which is considering Condi Rice as VP.
Ah. OK then; I just got confused.
America needs to be dragged into the 21st century.
I agree. But I don’t know if America is ready. If it was not for Hillary, what makes you think they will be ready for a black woman?
How do you “get ready?” My father was far from being racist or prejudiced, thought the United States was “not ready” for a Black president during the 2008 campaign. The country surprised him.
Many voters will have no trouble voting for a qualified woman, even one who isn’t white. I don’t dispute misogyny and racism play a role in elections, but I’m hopeful that enough people who are uncomfortable with Susan Rice, for example, will be “ready” enough to vote for Biden if it means getting rid of Trump and thus, perhaps, saving our country.
Still playing identity politics, while claiming not to?
Some people seem to think that it’s ‘identity politics’ to argue for picking a black woman, but it’s not ‘identity politics’ to argue against picking a black woman.
“Balkanization” is good for the country. Ideally it will lead us to become more unified.
What? you say? “Balkanization” has negative connotations. How could it be a good thing?
White land owning males once had all the power.
Then just White Males
Blacks kinda got power on paper but not in practice
Woman got some power
Blacks got some more power
Other ethnic groups joined in
Gays got power
Now we all have power to influence our national society. (ok this is a little optimistic)
I don’t think anymore of Biden focusing on a female Black person as I would any other presidential candidate focusing on a white male. Which they mostly have done, while without explicitly stating so.
Someday I hope we are all just Americans, but without acknowledging non- white males we aren’t gonna get there.
I think that the majority of America is ready for a black woman president. There are those whose minds will be changed and those who will never be ready. I don’t see any reason to wait until everybody agrees. Do you think that raising questions about public state of readiness is an effective way to sew doubt in the minds of the electorate?
Do you know what happened in 1968? There was a lot of rioting. And the incumbent President and his party lost credibility over it and were defeated in the election.
Can you explain why Trump would be pushing that precedent?
Or are you suggesting Trump is pushing for the Democratic front runner to be assassinated?
What a great idea. Let’s learn a little history then. The 3/5 compromise wasn’t because slave owners thought slaves were only 3/5 of a person. It was the north who wanted NO representation for slaves, and the South that wanted 100%. Thus the compromise.
But neither side argued because they cared about the slaves. The North wanted no representatikn for slaves because if slaves were counted as full citizens the South would gain more representatives based on population. The South wanted their slaves counted 100% because that would give the Southern states more representation in Congress.
The slaves were just pawns in a power struggle between the North and South. And if the north had their way, they would have had no representatikn at all.
Nonsense. The slaves never had representation in any real sense. The 3/5 compromise gave the voting public (not slaves, obviously, nor women, or really anyone but rich white male landholders in most cases) additional power in Congress–power to keep slavery in place.
The Southern states always had the option to gain full representative power for their slaves without any compromise: free them. They still would not have any representation (see: white), but they would count 1:1 for the purposes of Congress.
It was in the slaves’ interest to give them the minimum Congressional representation possible, since said representation was only ever used against them. Your implication otherwise is absurd.
Look at Biden’s competition. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren performed badly on health care, and the first chose her sister as campaign manager. (Trump chose his son-in-law as one of his campaign managers too. It didn’t work well.) Bernie Sanders relied on college students who don’t turn out to vote. Andrew Yang ran on UBI (more popular than it’s ever been, but still very unpopular; see the mishandling of the New Green Deal). I don’t have any criticisms for Amy Klobuchar, but she did not have Biden’s extra decades of name recognition, including being the Vice President to a popular president.
Democratic voters don’t choose candidates based on one criterion, no matter what the Republican Party says.
I never implied anything. I merely stated the facts - that the ‘3/5 compromise’ was not about determining ‘how human’ slaves were, but the result of a power struggle between the north and south. You’re the one trying to put words in my mouth. I happen to agree with you that the south gaining more ‘representation’ would be used to further the cause of slavery, and therefore wasn’t helpful to black people.
But that wasn’t what I was talking about. I was just correcting the factual record. There are many people who think the 3/5 compromise was about determining that black people are only worth 3/5 of a white person, or whatever. In fact, it was just a way of gaining or losing political power for the state.
I’m guessing that if you asked most people they would assume that the North wanted them to be 5/5, and the south wanted them to have 0/5. In fact, it was the other way around, but it had less to do with slavery and everything to do with naked power struggles between states, only part of which involved the issue of slavery. This happened about 90 years before slavery was abolished. The compromise changed the power balance at a time when the issues of the day were more about land, trade, etc.
You are implying otherwise. You do that every time you talk about “the south”.
That’s the point I feel Dr.Strangelove is making. The people who owned slaves were not “the south”. They were a small minority even in southern states.
The slave owners weren’t seeking representation for the south. They were hijacking their states in order to look out for their own special interests.
And it worked. Slave owners were able to convince other white southerners that owning slaves was a fundamental right that even people who didn’t own slaves should defend.
The naked power struggle was also about slavery, so this isn’t a great distinction.
You conflated two versions of “representation” to try to make the North sound like the bad guy in the 3/5 compromise. There is representation in the sense of counting the population to determine the number of representatives a state gets. And then there is representation in the sense that a resident of a state has influence over the political direction of that state. Today, those two ideas are correlated. Back then, not so much (except for rich white guys).
Most people barely know how our system works, so probably they would get the details of the 3/5 compromise wrong as well. But if you explained it in clearer terms: “Suppose voters with slaves got more voting power than voters without slaves. Which side supports this idea?” I think people would get it right.
I never once said or implied that the ‘North’ was the bad guy. The north was correct: So long as people were slaves, their slaveowners should not get to credit them as citizens for the purpose of additional representation for the South. The North’s point was that so long as they had no voting rights and were treated as property, the South could not also claim them as citizens for the purpose of political power.
In a way it was an attempt at a kind of gerrymandering by the south - an attempt to gain political power through specious claims.
It wasn’t about slavery per se. The issues that were common at the time had more to do with the cotton and tobacco trades, land grants, armies, federal land ownership, etc. Slavery was one of the issues, but it wasn’t the primary one. As I said, slavery existed for 90 more years.
At no point in this discussion did I suggest that the south represented the ‘good guys’, or that the north was the ‘bad guy’. I was simply explaining what happened and why.
In the late 1700’s, slavery in America was treated about like gay rights were in the 1960’s. Many individuals found slavery wrong, especially in the North where slavery wasn’t economically viable anyway except for a few places like New York and New Jersey, both which allowed ownership of slaves until 1824, almost 30 years after the compromise (they banned selling and buying slaves in 1804, but allowed slaveowners to keep their slaves as indentured servants for 20 more years).
At the time of the compromise the abolitionist movement was just starting in Britain and in a few northern states, but slavery was still legal in much of the world including France, Britain, Dutch, Spain, Portugal, and other colonial powers.
So, to reiterate my original point: The 3/5 compromise was just about apportioning seats in congress. The south cynically tried to use their slaves as ‘citizens’ to gain political power since they had the vast majority of them, despite the fact that they were not citizens in any meaningful way, not having their own agency. The south wanted to have their cake and eat it too: they wanted to simultaeously treat black people as chattel, while pretending they were citizens for the purpose of gaining political power for things having little to do with slavery. The north, rightly so, was having none of it. So a 3/5 compromise was reached.
It was never about determing ‘how much of a human’ a black person was. In fact, it wasn’t about black people’s abilities or characteristics at all. It was about trying to claim that slaves were also citizens, but only for the purpose of apportioning representation in congress. A ludicrous, evil position if you need me to be clearer.